To visualize SALSA programs, SALSA has been instrumented by including event-sending behavior. In this way, any executed SALSA program may be visualized without any additional configuration.
The easiest way to use OverView to visualize SALSA programs is to download the latest OverView-instrumented SALSA binary, which can be found at:
You should download overview<version>.jar and salsa<version>i.jar, and place them in a convenient location. When executing your SALSA application, simply ensure that both JAR files are in your Java classpath (by either using the CLASSPATH environment variable, or by using the -cp command line switch).
If you wish to compile OverView and SALSA from source and instrument SALSA yourself, please see the respective documentations for OverView and SALSA.
To run OverView and visualize your SALSA application, you must keep in mind that event sinks must be started before event sources; in practical terms, this means that the OverView visualization must be running before you start your SALSA program.
To do so is relatively simple: you will need an OverView Daemon (OVD) to collect and forward events, and an OverView Presenter (OVP) to display the visualization.
If you are running OVP and OVD on the same machine, OVD's host:port will generally be localhost:6060.
After OverView is running, you may start your SALSA theaters, name servers, and so on. Merely note that every SALSA program that is run (including theaters!) must have the command line switch -DovHost=<host:port of OVD> to enable event sending, and to tell SALSA where to send events.
If you wish to use the instrumented version of SALSA without OverView, simply don't specify -DovHost! SALSA programs will then run as usual, without trying to send events.
You can test OverView and SALSA with the following SALSA example:
You should begin to see a visualization of the sequence of Fibonacci numbers being calculated recursively, using SALSA actors.